Ep #145: Simplicity: Why You're Too Smart for Your Own Good

Transcript

In this episode, I’m gonna tell you why you’re too smart and why that’s the reason that you haven’t been as successful as you wanna be.

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Hey, it’s Casey. Welcome back, and I know, a weird lead, right? Like you’re too smart. Maybe you’re too smart for your own good. Let’s talk about what that means. So the first thing is that you know someone in your life that isn’t as smart as you, and this person is more successful than you. They’re making more money than you, they have more freedom than you, they have a better quality of life, they call the shots. Like something’s happening where they’re not as smart as you, but they’re winning and you’re not. You’re not winning at their level, and it might feel a little unfair, doesn’t it? Like how can that person you went to high school with, that person that you grew up with, that person you used to work with, your spouse’s friend, whatever it is, there’s someone in your life that you’re pegging and saying, “Ugh, I am so much smarter than that person, yet,” right? “Yet they’re winning in these different domains and I’m not.” I wanna suggest that the issue is around simplicity. So let’s first diagnose you a little bit, okay? I think you’re a smart person, I think you’re well-read, and I think you’re a bit of a nerd, especially when it comes to marketing. You’re listening to a podcast about marketing, right?

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There’s something about you that’s pretty nerdy. It was funny yesterday I was hosting a call with our CMOs and more than half of them had glasses on, right? A lot of nerds in the room, and when I asked a handful of others that didn’t have glasses on had contacts in or like me, they had LASIK. So a lot of nerds here, right? And as a nerd, you enjoy marketing. You enjoy the struggle of it. You enjoy learning new things, trying things, seeing what wins, feeling good about wins. Always just like wanting more and different and the increased complexity is an intellectual struggle that helps you feel like you’re growing and you’re smarter and life is just like a little richer because you understand how things work better. You think at some level that if you know just more, you’re going to have it. Like the difference between where you are and where you wanna be is your knowledge. If you knew more, if you knew how to do that thing with the LLMs and building the software thing and with AI, or if you really knew how to, if you finally wrote the book, if you finally. You know what I mean? Like you have this thing where your intelligence tells you that the way to get to the next level is to quench your thirst for more brainy stuff, and I wanna challenge that assumption.

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Maybe your whole life people have said that you’re smart, you’re a really smart person. Or you’ve just secretly known it. Maybe other people haven’t noticed it, but you know it, like the way that you read and the way that you’re thinking. Like you feel intellectual, yet you’re struggling to get to the next level. Let me tell you the reason for that. It’s not intelligence. It’s actually the antithesis of intelligence. It’s simplicity. It’s just simplicity. Simplicity is what you’re lacking. Simplicity scales. Complexity has a ceiling. When things are hard and you’re spinning a lot of plates and you’re doing a bunch of different stuff all the time, you can’t add more. You simply can’t add more. So the first thing for you to take away from this episode is to fill your cup, you have to first empty your cup. I think of one of our CMOs inside of the accelerator, and he joined with a ton of clients. I think he said yesterday there was 15 or 16. He says he doesn’t even know how many clients he had. But they were all bottom dollar clients. They were paying him a couple hundred bucks a month. He joined the accelerator, and he is now

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replacing his lowest paying clients with clients that now pay him $10,000 a month. So now he’s going from very low wages, lot of complexity there in relationship volume. Just like imagine being a parent to one child versus being a parent to 12. You don’t have the same level of depth with 12 kids that you have with one, let alone 15 or 16, right? So he was in a complex relationship with too many clients, and they all had different needs. And while he could simplify his service offering, that’s still a lot of people to remember, a lot of names to remember. And those people join the calls with him, and they wanna feel special, and he doesn’t remember the things that make them feel special. How could he? 16 clients, maybe two people, three people per team. That’s 20, 30, 40 people that he has to keep in his mind. That’s a lot of labor to still maintain an understanding of these people. And when we think of Dunbar’s number, which states that the average person can have meaningful conversations and remember details about 150-ish people, when you fill 40 of

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those people in your life with clients, it’s just a heavy load. And some of you don’t have the mental capacity to have that kind of depth. You don’t have the ability to hold that many relationships in your mind. It’s just like a natural thing. Totally fine. Nothing’s wrong with you. That’s just how it is. Other people, I got a buddy, his name’s Max. Man, that guy knows everything. Everything. He knows everything about everybody. I bet his Dunbar number is 300 or 500 or something. It’s ridiculous. I’ll go home and I’ll see him and we’ll go for a drive, and he’ll be like, “Oh, do you see that? She was this. Do you remember in high school when yada, yada?” I was like, “No, dude, I don’t really remember that.” He’s “Oh, and look over there. That’s this person, and they married this person, who is the cousin of our old teacher who…” I don’t know that stuff. I can’t follow that. So some of you can, some of you can’t. That’s fine. Just think the more clients that you have, the more load it is on your brain. So the first thing I wanna offer to you is simplicity. Just simplicity. And this is simplicity in client relationships. How many clients are you working? How many clients do you have? For the longest time I’ve said, three to five clients, and the longer I spend as a fractional CMO, the more I want three clients or two

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clients. I don’t want five. I don’t want more than five, that’s for damn sure. But you want just a couple clients. Remember, if you want to increase your rates, just find clients that can pay you more because you’re solving bigger problems and replace clients. Don’t add new clients, just replace them. If you’re at five grand a month, don’t go get another five grand a month client. Replace them with a 10 grand a month client. You have the same amount of revenue, it’s like more simplicity. So you want simplicity in your client relationships. Simple, right? That makes sense. The fewer client relationships, the better. We’re not in the agency game where we’re getting new clients all the time and we’re churning them out. Our churn isn’t significant. Our churn is we lose a client every eight to 18 months maybe, something like that. It’s where you want to be. You want to hold clients for a year or longer. All right, the next thing is simplicity in contracts or your agreement. Like what you do and what you don’t do, that’s what the contract states. And contract is a funny word. I think it’s, when you think of a contract in your mind, you know what I’m talking about, but I don’t think of it as a contract. I think of it as an agreement, like we’re agreeing to something together. The contract is the legal piece, so

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absolutely you have to have it, and in the accelerator we have like my contract that I hired a lawyer for that I use, and everyone else has access to that. That has all the kind of gotchas in there that you want to make sure that you have that protects you. So you want simplicity in your contracts. You want your contracts to state the work that you do and the work that you don’t do, and too many of you are doing implementation. Too many of you are just being the laborer for your client, and it’s silly, and you’re doing it because you don’t have the confidence to say, “I’m just doing strategy and leadership.” Now, I’m not saying don’t roll up your sleeves and get in the mud and have a little bit of fun with the team every now and then to build something out or, for me, I like to write some copy or maybe I’ll see like a new AI thing like Claude Design and I’ll spend a day on it, and then I’ll share those results with the team and like I’m doing implementation, but it’s not because I’m instructed to do it. I’m doing it because I’m having fun. I’m playing. That’s where you want to be. You don’t want to be instructed like, “Okay, as the CMO, your job is also to write 25 emails.” It’s no. My job is to lay out that I need emails written, and I might write the first one or two emails to instruct the person who’s going to write the rest or the AI but I’m not going to write those

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emails myself. So the work that you do and the work that you don’t do, there’s simplicity in that. Some of you have relationships with clients that are so messed up, man. It’s okay, you got this client, you’re doing fractional CMO work for it, but you also have an agency, but you’re the only person at your agency, so your agency’s charge is like $90 an hour, but as a fractional CMO, you charge $150 or $200 an hour, and then you got to like time logs and you got to justify fees and maybe have subcontractors, and you got to go figure out how to do all that stuff. You got to pay them, and then what happens when they’re on maternity leave or someone’s sick, and what if a product is delayed? And it’s just stress, man. You can’t scale a business with that level of stress. Think about your buddy or the person that you were thinking about earlier who’s not as smart as you, who’s more successful than you. They’re probably not as stressed as you either, right? They have a process that is easier for them to operate inside of. All right. The next thing is, like, how you take payment. This is a simple one. How do you take payment? I’ll just give it to you. You get paid upfront every single month for the work you’re about to

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do. The client says, “We don’t do that with our vendors. We do a net 30 or a net seven or something.” You say, “Cool, great. I’m different. This is how I work, and if you don’t wanna work with me, that’s okay.” And you might lose a client on that. A deal might not close because of that. But if you, like, by and large, if you don’t hold to your ground there, then what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna lose your footing, and the client is gonna change when they pay you, and then you’re gonna have to be like, “I need to get paid. I need to cover my rent, my mortgage, my whatever.” So there’s a lot here to how you take payment, and that’s very important that you kinda keep it simple. Do you take it through a credit card, ACH? Does it debit on a certain date? What’s your rate? What’s your rate is an easy one. Don’t do goofy rates. Just do straight rates, like five grand a month, 10 grand a month, 7,500 a month, nine grand a month. Easy numbers that you can count on your fingers, right? You think of that person who’s not as smart as you that’s more successful. That person, their math is simple. They’re not doing complicated spreadsheets with formulas and everything. They’re just like, “Okay, that one was 10 plus 12 plus 6 plus 12. Okay, this is how much money it is.” It’s just

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simple. All of that is simple. Next thing where you need simplicity is how you’re communicated with. How can you be communicated with that is simple, something that doesn’t take effort? This is how people communicate with you. Do you hate Microsoft Teams? Or, are you masochistic and you like it? If you are fine with Teams, cool. If you don’t want Teams, don’t work with clients that use Microsoft Teams. What about G Chat? What about Slack? Do you wanna be in those channels? Do you wanna be in a WhatsApp channel? How do you wanna work with people? How are you communicated with? Do you show up on calls? Are they always video calls? Are you cool with video calls? I’ve been with clients that are no video calls, which is a delight, but I’ve been on the other side too, that it’s exclusively video calls all the time, even when people aren’t feeling well, and that’s not fun. So you wanna have simplicity in this stuff, and you wanna be able to set your own boundaries for it. Another big thing for you: no partners. You don’t want a partner in your fractional CMO business. We’ve got a CMO who came in and she had a partner, and it just created a lot of stress. Namely, for her to get to her revenue, she actually has to get twice the number of clients. It’s twice the sales. And that’s just more mental load to

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have a partner in there. Now, that partner could be doing really great work, but it’s better for her to have just a couple of her own clients cover all of her bills, be safe, and then, if a project comes in that she wants to bring someone else in, she can bring someone else in, but that person should contract directly to the organization and not through her. Same is true for you. No partners, no funny business. Just hear me out on this. Simplicity will win. And this is simplicity when it comes to the industry that you’re in, the niche that you’re in, the type of problems that you solve. This is probably the biggest gotcha for you folks, which is one day you could be talking to someone who has a brewery, and then your client later that afternoon is someone who owns a roofing company, and then your client the next day has a SaaS product, and the next company is trying to revolutionize AI something or other. And you enjoy the mental gymnastics and the fun of context switching and everything, yet you’re not getting the depth because you’re not doing the same thing over and over. You don’t understand the market. You don’t understand what good reporting looks like. You’re getting okay reporting, but it takes you too

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long to get to the result that you want to have. And it’s just as frustrating for everybody. Your client starts to feel like you’re not delivering the value. You start feeling like you’re not delivering the value. And it’s because you’re not, because you’re just too thin. You’re pushed too far in too many different directions, and you just, think about, I’ve been making a lot of pizzas recently in my backyard. We had some friends over, and I had to prep to learn how to make all the dough and do the whole thing with the pizza oven. And, you want that dough to be thin and at some point it just tears, and then you have to throw it away. It’s hard to take well-floured dough and stretch it too thin. That’s the way you are, too. You’re gonna get stretched too thin with too many clients in too many industries, and it’s just gonna hurt you. This is a problem you must resolve. So the answer is simplicity. Simplicity in all things. Simplicity in the applications that you use. Should you use Copilot or Gemini or ChatGPT or Claude or z.ai or Groq? I don’t care what you use, but don’t use them all. Choose your toolset. “Oh, so you’re saying, Casey, I should do no implementation?” I’m like, “Yeah, probably no implementation or exceedingly little

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implementation.” This line is getting a little blurred with AI tools because we can implement things quickly that would otherwise take us weeks or months and we save the client time and money, and it’s not really more labor for us, but it is learning. So just consider that stuff, but above all, simplicity is the thing that’s gonna guide you to that life of the person that you were thinking of at the top of the call, someone who has a simpler life. And this is probably going to be your biggest struggle. You can take on complex. Someone comes to you and they’re like, “Hey, I’ve got this new business, and here’s what we’re doing,” or, “Hey, we’re gonna get this funding. I need some help with grant writing, and then when we have cash flow, then we wanna do this with you,” and yada, and a rebrand, and yada. And you’re like, “I’ve never done it, but I can do it.” You’re that person, and your friend who is more successful than you, they wouldn’t do it. They say, “Oh, that’s cool. I could introduce you to my buddy. That’s what they do, but that’s not for me.” They’re just gonna turn it down. You’re gonna take it. You taking it is the problem. So taking on things that don’t work for you because it’s short-term money is gonna add long-term stress. I want you to have a simple life. I want you to choose the type of clients that you wanna work with. And listen to the past

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episode, I talked about becoming the person that people even want in the first place, and that’s pretty critical. And this is what we do inside the accelerator. This is what we talk about every single day. And I would love to support you. Book in a call with my team, cmox.co/call. Book it in right now, and we’ll tell you if you’ve got the experience, the know-how to be a successful fractional CMO, and we’ll share what it looks like for us to work together. All right. Good luck. I wish you a simple life. I wish you a level of stupidity that allows deep relaxation and freedom and profitability because you’re unwilling to take on unnecessarily complex things that only drive you further from your goal, despite them giving you dopamine. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing like having the money in the bank account, on the vacation that you wanna be on, having the lifestyle that you wanna live. That’s where you wanna be, not stressing every day because you’re learning new things and everything’s changing and Claude down and now I can’t and whatever.

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All right? Book in a call, cmox.co/call, and I’ll see you soon. Bye.